Donkey Kong Archive

Donkey Kong 64 is a divisive game. Some, like myself, feel that the game was a pretty solid platformer. Others feel that the game is the pinnacle of the absurd collect-a-thon that apparently plagued the 32/64-bit console era. No matter your stance, you’ll probably agree that the DK Rap was a bad idea.

Donkey Kong Land is basically what happened when Rare and Nintendo dragged Donkey Kong Country kicking and screaming onto the Game Boy. The first game features an entirely original set of levels, while the second and third games are more closely based on their SNES equivalents.

Imagine this. A father and his young daughter play a lot of old games together. The daughter’s favourite game is Donkey Kong, but she’s bummed out that she can’t play as Pauline and rescue Mario. What does a father do?

Most of us would just leave it at that, but not Mike Mika. The rather industrious father hacked the game and drew new sprites so that his father could play as Pauline and rescue Mario from the clutches of DK.

Donkey Kong for the Game Boy, known to most as Donkey Kong ’94, is one of the finest games on Nintendo’s old handheld. It starts out as an adaptation of the original 1981 arcade game – but when you defeat DK at the end of the arcade game’s original final level, the sneaky ape gets up and steal’s Pauline again, and Mario has to chase him through another 40 odd levels of platforming fun.

We’ve seen some high profile withdrawls of games from the Wii’s Virtual Console about, but this one is perhaps the most surprising. Reports are coming in from the US that Nintendo has pulled Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie’s Double Trouble from the Virtual Console service. Nintendo has not provided a reason for the change. Word is that the games will be pulled from PAL region stores on the 25th of November – so if you want them, download them now.

Some folks are speculating that Nintendo might be upgrading the games to support the WiiU Game Pad, or be planning some kind of Donkey Kong collection disc, but these stories seem unlikely at this point – Donkey Kong‘s 30th anniversary was last year. There are no rights issues with Rare, as Nintendo always owned the rights to the games and characters Rare created for the franchise.

It’s not widely known, but Nintendo updated Donkey Kong Land III from the black & white (or pea soup green, depending on your system) Game Boy to the Game Boy Color when they brought the game to Japan. While the Japanese had to wait an extra two years to play the game, they got to do so with a superior version.

And now you can too, thanks to the hard work of Blaziken257, who has prepared an English translation patch for the Japanese version of the game, known as Donkey Kong GB: Dinky Kong and Dixie Kong.

Nintendo of America will be rewarding those who purchase Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Style Savy: Trendsetters, Crosswords Plus, Art Academy: Lessons for Everyone!, and Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask through the 3DS eShop with a free copy of Donkey Kong: Original Edition.

Donkey Kong: Original Edition is an updated re-release of the NES version of the game which was only available pre-installed on the European release of the limited edition Mario 25th edition Red Wii. It includes the cement factory level, restoring the game to its full state.

Dr. Hank Chien, the reigning Donkey Kong world record holder has made it just that little bit harder to knock him off the top by posting a new record high score of 1,110,000.

According to a recent interview with historian Patrick Scott Patterson, Chien thinks he can push the mark even further. He remarked that “This was not a killscreen game. I died two screens shy of the killscreen so my score would have been a little higher, perhaps 1.12 million points. I had a spare man going into Level 21 and was mentally preparing to sacrifice it on the last barrel board and my game was over a few minutes later. That’s how Donkey Kong rolls sometimes.”

The battle for the Donkey Kong world record between Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe was the subject of the 2008 film The King of Kong.

Donkey Kong Land 2 is the Game Boy adaptation of Donkey Kong Country 2. Whereas the original Donkey Kong Land was an original game inspired by DKC, the second game is more or less a cut down port. It’s still pretty good, but you’re really just better off playing the SNES original.